How the
Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election
Blame the media for making whole generations hate The Process

By Matt Taibbi

October 10, 2012 "Rolling
Stone"
-- Well, it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like
Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to
the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like
four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein
sitting on your face. But it's not so much the result that
matters – it's the quiet.

What we
Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and
unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of
dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred
and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or
two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out
into a process that involves two years of relentless,
suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging
directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that
by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and
literally divides families.

Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have
to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American
psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment,
there are people all over the country who are stocking up on
canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come
if Obama is re-elected. For the broadcast business to be
successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our
political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state
about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened
not to watch what happens next. And any person who's been
subjected to 720 consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to
take the news well if he gets the wrong result, whether it's a
victory for Obama or for Romney. By that point, the networks
have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince him
that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or
Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep him coming back
and watching ads.

The
campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should
be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal
to publish poll numbers. This isn't as crazy as it sounds – they
actually had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and
people were much happier. (Well, they were still miserable,
because they were Russian, but at least they weren't stressing
about poll numbers.) Think about it: Banning poll numbers would
force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now,
the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a
couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark
tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to
come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't
centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in
the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so
badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any
polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down
our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can
use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine if your favorite
news network had to do stories like, "What is the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the
candidates think about it?" That would be like asking
Nineties-era baseball players to take the field without popping
greenies – what, you mean play the game sober? Half the
on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking
reverse mortgages.

It
obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly
valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think
is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has
gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency
itself. In every race there are now not two but three dominating
figures – the Democrat, the Republican and The Process, and
we're raising whole generations who hate The Process far more
than they like either of the candidates. Mainly for grim
commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay
wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking
moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of
everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and
their desire to vote. If The Process is so clearly wrong, how
right can the candidates be?

If we did
this right, people would come out of presidential elections
exhilarated, maybe even stoked to get involved in their local
races for county sheriff or D.A. (Such races would likely have
more of an impact on their day-to-day lives: For the most part,
when it comes to our daily routines, the president might as well
be on Mars.) Instead, most of us come out of the election
exhausted, in desperate need of a couple of Ambiens and
determined to spend the next two years buried in Hulu reruns,
afraid to even pass a news channel while couch-surfing
our way to Storage Wars or a Lifetime movie.

What makes
us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the
media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every
move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon
liars in Washington. And that's a shame, because feeling
optimistic shouldn't require turning off the TV or tuning out
The Process. What we are witnessing, after all, is the world's
greatest contest for power, an amazing fairy tale full of iconic
moments that we'll watch no matter how much Sean Hannity or
Chris Matthews screams at us. But it would be awesome, next
time, if we could find a way to turn down the volume.

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